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US carries out more airstrikes in Pakistan

Monday, November 3rd, 2008

By James Cogan | In open contempt of the repeated protests by the Pakistani government, the US military carried out another two air strikes on October 31 against houses inside Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Agencies (FATA), killing at least 27 people.

Last Wednesday, the government of Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani issued a formal protest to the US ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson, over an air strike on October 26 that killed 15 people. According to Pakistani officials cited by the New York Times, Patterson was told “such attacks were a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty and should be stopped immediately”.

The US answer was given two days later. In the first attack, a remotely-controlled, unmanned Predator plane launched missiles into the home of a local cleric in the village of Asori, in the agency of North Waziristan. It then fired more missiles at a vehicle attempting to leave the scene. It is believed that 24 people died, including women and children. In unconfirmed reports, Pakistani officials have alleged that a senior Al Qaeda leader, Abdur Rehman, also known as Abu Akasha al Iraqi, was among the slain. As with all previous claims, no evidence has been presented.

The second Predator attack was carried out against a home near the town of Wana, in the agency of South Waziristan. The suspected target was the Pakistani Taliban leader Maulvi Nazir, who is believed to have close relations with Afghan Taliban militants who are fighting against the US-led occupation. Nazir reportedly escaped with only minor injuries, but three other people were killed.

The air strikes were the latest in an escalating campaign of attacks into Pakistan. As many as 20 air strikes and one ground incursion have been carried out in the past two months.

The Pakistani prime minister on one occasion denounced the US operations as “acts of terrorism”. It is not only suspected Al Qaeda or Taliban leaders who are being killed, but their wives, children, elderly parents and any other innocent civilians who happen to be in the vicinity of the houses that are being blown to pieces. The attacks are provoking mass outrage throughout the country and are fuelling support for Islamist organisations that are opposed to the civilian government and supporting the anti-US insurgency in Afghanistan.

The official position in Washington is to refuse to confirm or deny that US forces are responsible for the reported attacks.

The reality is that since July, the US military has had carte blanche from the Bush administration to order attacks that violate the sovereignty of Pakistan—an ostensible US ally. Previously, such operations had to be personally approved by the president. Now, the military head of Centcom (Central Command), which covers the Middle East and Central Asia, can unilaterally decide to launch an attack on alleged “terrorist havens”.

Reports are now surfacing that any country, not only Pakistan, can be targeted under Bush’s secret directive. On October 26, US special forces carried out an assault on the Syrian village of Abu Kamal—the first such incursion into Syria. Seven civilians were killed. The operation would have been ordered in close liaison with General David Petraeus, the former commander of US forces in Iraq and the favourite of the most militarist wing of the American ruling class. Petraeus assumed command of Centcom on the same day as the latest Pakistani airstrikes.

The US national security commentator Eli Lake, writing in the New Republic last Tuesday, reported that Bush had authorised Central Command to strike anywhere in its designated region. The only limitation is that Petraeus requires the approval of at least the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to attack targets inside Iran—as the Iranian military theoretically has the capacity to strike back in the Western hemisphere.

If this is correct, the Bush directive has far-reaching implications. It means that Petraeus has the power to order unprovoked acts of war against nations throughout the Middle East and Central Asia, without even the knowledge of the incoming president, let alone a debate and vote in the US Congress.

Roger Cressey, a former aide to Richard Clarke, the chief counter terrorism advisor of the Clinton administration, told the New Republic: “The bar for military operations will be lowered because the downsides for the president are minimal.”

According to Lake, other countries that could be targeted include Yemen, Kenya, Mali and Sudan—the last three are covered by the US military’s newly inaugurated Africa Command.

Barack Obama, the Democratic Party presidential candidate and most likely victor in Tuesday’s election, has made no public comment on either the raid into Syria or Friday’s attack in Pakistan. The silence testifies to his consent. Throughout his campaign, Obama has declared his willingness to order unilateral attacks into Pakistan or other countries allegedly providing a safe haven to terrorists.

Lake commented in the New Republic: “His campaign rhetoric has now become the official war policy he will inherit.” Any administration Obama heads would not only boost the number of US troops in Afghanistan, but intensify the operations over the border.

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Troops Have to Fight for Their Right to Vote

Monday, November 3rd, 2008

Active-duty military members arguably have more to lose than anyone else in Tuesday’s election, but voting can be an obstacle course for servicemen and -women overseas. The Dallas Morning News reports that in 2006 only one-third of the absentee ballots requested by U.S. armed forces personnel abroad were counted.

Dallas Morning News:

For U.S. troops serving overseas, nothing comes easy. Not even voting.

Military members may not have enough time to complete and mail in their absentee ballots for Tuesday’s election, thanks to slow mail delivery, lack of information sharing among election officials, and procedural errors.

In the 2006 elections, about a third of the close to 1 million absentee ballots requested by uniformed overseas voters were returned and tallied, essentially disenfranchising the remaining 600,000-plus service members, according to the federal Election Assistance Commission.

Barack Obama and John McCain have called on state election officials to reduce the voting obstacles for preventing military personnel from voting. And Texas Sen. John Cornyn sponsored a bill that passed the Senate this month directing the Department of Defense to make absentee voting easier for service members stationed abroad. Mr. Cornyn has also launched a related Web site.

But problems persist, as illustrated by one Garland native’s struggle to vote in Tuesday’s election.

Air Force Special Agent Robert Douglass Davis, stationed in Europe, moved to a new base in 2007. In April, he tried to change the mailing address on his voter registration using an application on the Texas secretary of state’s Web site.

But Agent Davis still hadn’t received his ballot by early October. He called the Dallas County Elections Department long distance but encountered problems with the county’s pre-recorded directory.

His mother, Susan, called the elections department and was told that her son’s change of address had been received by the department but that his absentee ballot was mailed to his old base.

Because the mail-forwarding service at the base had expired, Agent Davis didn’t receive that ballot. Elections officials said they would send him a ballot at his new base, but that he would have to request a change of address in writing to update the registration on file with the county.

Robert’s father, Doug, was livid about his son’s troubles.

“I think it’s damn pathetic,” said the elder Mr. Davis, who believes the delay will keep his son from voting. “It’s just due to incompetence.”

But a county elections spokeswoman said the problem is that any changes made to the rolls using the secretary of state’s address-change application aren’t automatically transferred to the county rolls.

“It does not update our permanent database,” said Vickey Bynum, early voting mail supervisor for the department. “We manually have to go in and make changes to the permanent file.”

And county Election Administrator Bruce Sherbet said the secretary of state’s new database and the change-of-address forms were added only in 2006. He said similar technology to update county registration information is still several years away.

Mr. Sherbet said Agent Davis’ absentee ballot was remailed to his new base address Oct. 21. He said there is a five-day window after Election Day when ballots from abroad can still be received and counted toward a final vote tally.

As of Thursday, Agent Davis still had not received his ballot.

Ms. Bynum said that if he believes his absentee ballot will not reach the elections department in time, he can download and mail a federal write-in ballot — but he would be able to vote only for president and U.S. senator.

Faced with that possibility, Agent Davis said he’d opt for the write-in ballot.

“It’s better than not being able to vote for anything,” he said, but “It’s kind of like consolation-prize voting.”

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Is Paulson’s Plan Mysterious or Non-Existent?

Monday, November 3rd, 2008

By Philip Mattera |

Those who regard Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s bailout program as a step toward socialism should remember that such a system involves not just government ownership but also some degree of centralized economic planning. With all the twists and turns in Paulson’s actions, it is difficult to determine whether he is indeed trying to guide some aspects of U.S. business but is doing so in a way we mere mortals cannot understand.

Especially puzzling is Treasury’s approach to deciding which banks should receive capital infusions. It was no surprise that the first $125 billion went to nine of the country’s largest financial institutions, since Paulson believes that shoring up the big guys is key to restoring stability to the system. But when he then turned to regional banks for smaller injections, it was unclear why some were on the list and others were not (at least not yet).

As Fortune points out, Paulson seems to have deliberately omitted Cleveland’s National City Bank (which is now being sold to PNC) because of its precarious portfolio of bad home loans, but he included similarly situated ones such as Milwaukee’s Marshall & Isley. Now that Paulson, under pressure, is reportedly planning to extend the capital program to privately held banks, whose finances are less transparent, it will be more difficult to figure out if there is rhyme or reason to Treasury’s picks.

Paulson was so lackadaisical in structuring the bailout that the banks getting the federal investments did not hesitate to signal that they would use the funds not to make loans but rather to finance acquisitions and continue paying out dividends and probably big executive bonuses. Presumably responding to criticism from other quarters, ranging from members of Congress to the United Steelworkers, some banks are promising that they will take steps to ease the credit crunch. Yet it is unlikely these limited gestures will be enough to shore up a financial system that grows weaker by the day.

So, are things going according to Paulson’s plan—or is there no real plan but simply an ad hoc set of measures that desperately seek to prevent a collapse? Paulson seems to want it both ways. He is willing to push through an unprecedented partial nationalization of banks but is unwilling to use that investment to pressure banks to put the public interest before their selfish objectives (which now means lending as little as possible in a enervated economy). We end up with a bizarre form of socialism in which firms get government investment but continue doing what they damn well please.

While Paulson would like to be seen as the mastermind of a brilliant rescue plan, he may be, like the individual Dorothy and her friends discover is frantically manipulating a bunch of levers behind a curtain in Oz, just not a very good wizard.

Note: Since Treasury has been slow to announce all the banks receiving capital infusions, the investigative website ProPublica is filling the void with its own running list compiled with information from other sources.

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Keeping America Safe from Terrorism by Monitoring Distillery Webcams

Monday, November 3rd, 2008

Via Bruce Schneier |

Really:

We had an email recently from an observer “curious as to why the webcam that was inside the shop/bar is no longer there, or at least, functional”. The email was from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency in the United States.When we replied that it was simply a short term technical problem, we asked why on earth they could be interested in the comings and goings of a small Distillery off the West Coast of Scotland. Were there secret manoeuvres taking place in Loch Indaal, or even a threat of terrorists infiltrating the mainland via Islay?

The answer we received was even more surreal. Evidently the mission of the DTRA is to safeguard the US and its allies from weapons of mass destruction -chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and high explosives. The department which contacted the Distillery deals with the implementation of the Chemical Weapons Convention, going to sites to verify treaty compliance. Funnily enough chemical weapon processes look very similar to the distilling process and as part of training there is a visit to a brewery for familiarization with reactors, batch processors and evaporators. As they said, it just goes to show how “tweaks” to the process flow or equipment, can create something very pleasant (whisky) or deadly (chemical weapons).

As they say: “In the post-Cold War environment, a unified, consistent approach to deterring, reducing and countering weapons of mass destruction is essential to maintaining our national security. Under DTRA, Department of Defense resources, expertise and capabilities are combined to ensure the United States remains ready and able to address the present and future WMD threat. We perform four essential functions to accomplish our mission: combat support, technology development, threat control and threat reduction. These functions form the basis for how we are organized and our daily activities. Together, they enable us to reduce the physical and psychological terror of weapons of mass destruction, thereby enhancing the security of the world’s citizens. At the dawn of the 21st century, no other task is as challenging or demanding”.

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Finally The End of a Subprime Administration

Monday, November 3rd, 2008

They may have been the most disastrous dreamers, the most reckless gamblers, and the most vigorous imperial hucksters and grifters in our history. Selling was their passion. And they were classic American salesmen – if you’re talking about underwater land in Florida, or the Brooklyn Bridge, or three-card monte, or bizarre visions of Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicles armed with chemical and biological weaponry let loose over the U.S., or Saddam Hussein’s mushroom clouds rising over American cities, or a full-scale reordering of the Middle East to our taste, or simply eternal global dominance.

When historians look back, it will be far clearer that the “commander in chief” of a “wartime” country and his top officials were focused, first and foremost, not on the shifting “central theaters” of the Global War on Terror, but on the theater that mattered most to them – the “home front,” where they spent inordinate amounts of time selling the American people a bill of goods. Of his timing in ramping up a campaign to invade Iraq in September 2002, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card infamously explained: “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.”

Indeed.

From a White House where “victory strategies” meant purely for domestic consumption poured out, to the Pentagon where bevies of generals, admirals, and other high officers were constantly being mustered, not to lead armies but to lead public opinion, their selling focus was total. They were always releasing “new product.”

And don’t forget their own set of soaring inside-the-Beltway fantasies. After all, if a salesman is going to sell you some defective product, it always helps if he can sell himself on it first. And on this score, they were world champs.

Because events made it look so foolish, the phrase “shock and awe” that went with the initial attack on Iraq in March 2003 has now passed out of official language and (together with “mission accomplished”) into the annals of irony. Back then, though, as bombs and missiles blew up parts of Baghdad – to fabulous visual effect in that other “theater” of war, television – the phrase was constantly on official lips and in media reports everywhere. It went hand-in-glove with another curious political phrase: regime change.

Given the supposed unique technological proficiency of the U.S. military and its array of “precision” weapons, the warriors of Bushworld convinced themselves that a new era in military affairs had truly dawned. An enemy “regime” could now be taken out – quite literally and with surgical precision, in its bedrooms, conference rooms, and offices, thanks to those precision weapons delivered long-distance from ship or plane – without taking out a country. Poof! You only had to say the word and an oppressive regime would be, as it was termed, “decapitated.” Its people would then welcome with open arms relatively small numbers of American troops as liberators.

It all sounded so good, and high tech, and relatively simple, and casualty averse, and clean as a whistle. Even better, once there had been such a demonstration, a guaranteed “cakewalk” – as, say, in Iraq – who would ever dare stand up to American power again? Not only would one hated enemy dictator be dispatched to the dustbin of history, but evildoers everywhere, fearing the Bush equivalent of the wrath of Khan, would be shock-and-awed into submission or quickly dispatched in their own right.

In reality (ah, “reality” – what a nasty word!), the shock-and-awe attacks used on Iraq got not a single leader of the Saddamist regime, not one of that pack of 52 cards (including of course the ace of spades, Saddam Hussein, found in his “spiderhole” so many months later). Iraqi civilians were the ones killed in that precise and shocking moment, while Iraqi society was set on the road to destruction, and the world was not awed.

Strangely enough, though, the phrase, once reversed, proved applicable to the Bush administration’s seven-year post-9/11 history. They were, in a sense, the awe-and-shock administration. Initially, they were awed by the supposedly singular power of the American military to dominate and transform the planet; then, they were continually shocked and disbelieving when that same military, despite its massive destructive power, turned out to be incapable of doing so, or even of handling two ragtag insurgencies in two weakened countries, one of which, Afghanistan, was among the poorest and least technologically advanced on the planet.

The Theater of War

In remarkably short order, historically speaking, the administration’s soaring imperial fantasies turned into planetary nightmares. After 9/11, of course, George W. and crew promised Americans the global equivalent – and Republicans the domestic equivalent – of a 36,000 stock market and we know just where the stock market is today: only about 27,000 points short of that irreality.

Once upon a time, they really did think that, via the U.S. armed forces, or, as George W. Bush once so breathlessly put it, “the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known,” they could dominate the planet without significant help from allies or international institutions of any sort. Who else had a shot at it? In the post-Soviet world, who but a leadership backed by the full force of the U.S. military could possibly be a contender for the leading role in this epic movie? Who else could even turn out for a casting call? Impoverished Russia? China, still rebuilding its military and back then considered to have a host of potential problems? A bunch of terrorists? I mean… come on!

As they saw it, the situation was pretty basic. In fact, it gave the phrase “power politics” real meaning. After all, they had in their hands the reins attached to the sole superpower on this small orb. And wasn’t everyone – at least, everyone they cared to listen to, at least Charles Krauthammer and the editorial page of the Washington Post – saying no less?

I mean, what else would you do, if you suddenly, almost miraculously (after an election improbably settled by the Supreme Court), found yourself in sole command of the globe’s only “hyperpower,” the only sheriff on planet Earth, the New Rome. To make matters more delicious, in terms of getting just what you wanted, those hands were on those reins right after “the Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century,” when Americans were shocked and awed and terrified enough that anything-goes seemed a reasonable response?

It might have gone to anyone’s head in imperial Washington at that moment, but it went to their heads in such a striking way. After all, theirs was a plan – labeled in 2002 the Bush Doctrine – of global domination conceptually so un-American that, in my childhood, the only place you would have heard it was in the mouths of the most evil, snickering imperial Japanese, Nazi, or Soviet on-screen villains. And yet, in their moment of moments, it just rolled right out of their heads and off their tongues – and they were proud of it.

Here’s a question for 2009 you don’t have to answer: What should the former “new Rome” be called now? That will, of course, be someone else’s problem.

The Cast of Characters

And what a debacle the Bush Doctrine proved to be. What a legacy the legacy president and his pals are leaving behind. A wrecked economy, deflated global stock markets, collapsing banks and financial institutions, soaring unemployment, a smashed Republican Party, a bloated Pentagon overseeing a strained, overstretched military, mired in an incoherent set of still-expanding wars gone sour, a network of secret prisons, as well as Guantanamo, that “jewel in the crown” of Bush’s Bermuda Triangle of injustice, and all the grim practices that went with those offshore prisons, including widespread torture and abuse, kidnapping, assassination, and the disappearing of prisoners (once associated only with South America dictatorships and military juntas).

They headed a government that couldn’t shoot straight or plan ahead or do anything halfway effectively, an administration that emphasized “defense” – or “homeland security” as it came to be called in their years – above all else; yet they were always readying themselves for the last battle, and so were caught utterly, embarrassingly unready for 19 terrorists with box-cutters, a hurricane named Katrina, and an arcane set of Wall Street derivatives heading south.

As the supposed party of small government, they succeeded mainly in strangling civilian services, privatizing government operations into the hands of crony corporations, and bulking up state power in a massive way – making an already vast intelligence apparatus yet larger and more labyrinthine, expanding spying and surveillance of every kind, raising secrecy to a first principle, establishing a new U.S. military command for North America, endorsing a massive Pentagon buildup, establishing a second Defense Department labeled the Department of Homeland Security with its own mini-homeland-security-industrial complex, evading checks and powers in the Constitution whenever possible, and claiming new powers for a “unitary executive” commander-in-chief presidency.

No summary can quite do justice to what the administration “accomplished” in these years. If there was, however, a single quote from the world of George W. Bush that caught the deepest nature of the president and his core followers, it was offered by an “unnamed administration official” – often assumed to be Karl Rove – to journalist Ron Suskind back in October 2004:

“He] said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’”

“We create our own reality. … We’re history’s actors.”

It must for years have seemed that way, and everything about the lives they lived only reinforced that impression. After all, the president himself, as so many wrote, lived in a literal bubble world. Those who met him were carefully vetted; audiences were screened so that no one who didn’t fawn over him got near him; and when he traveled through foreign cities, they were cleared of life, turned into the equivalent of Potemkin villages, while he and his many armored cars and Blackhawk helicopters, his huge contingent of Secret Service agents and White House aides, his sniffer dogs and military sharpshooters, his chefs and who knows what else passed through.

Of course, the president had been in a close race with the reality principle (which, in his case, was the principle of failure) all his life – and whenever reality nipped at his heels, his father’s boys stepped in and whisked him off stage. He got by at his prep school, Andover, and then at Yale, a C-level legacy student and, appropriately enough when it came to sports, a cheerleader and, at Yale, a party animal as well as the president of the hardest-drinking fraternity on campus. He was there in the first place only because of who he wasn’t (or rather who his relations were).

Faced with the crises of the Vietnam era, he joined the Texas Air National Guard and more or less went missing in action. Faced with life, he became a drunk. Faced with business, he failed repeatedly and yet, thanks to his dad’s friends, became a multi-millionaire in the process. He was supported, cosseted, encouraged, and finally – to use an omnipresent word of our moment – bailed out. The first MBA president was a business bust. A certain well-honed, homey congeniality got him to the governorship and then to the presidency of the United States without real accomplishments. If there ever was a case for not voting for the guy you’d most like to “have a beer with,” this was it.

On that pile of rubble at Ground Zero on Sept. 14, 2001, with a bullhorn in his hands and various rescuers shouting, “USA! USA!” he genuinely found his “calling” as the country’s cheerleader in chief (as he had evidently found his religious calling earlier in life). He not only took the job seriously, he visibly loved it. He took a childlike pleasure in being in the “theater” of war. He was thrilled when some of the soldiers who captured Saddam Hussein in that “spiderhole” later presented him with the dictator’s pistol. (”‘He really liked showing it off,’ says a … visitor to the White House who has seen the gun. ‘He was really proud of it.’”) He was similarly thrilled, on a trip to Baghdad in 2007, to meet the American pilot “whose plane’s missiles killed Iraq’s al-Qaeda leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi” and “returned to Washington in a buoyant mood.”

While transforming himself into the national cheerleader in chief, he even kept “his own personal scorecard for the war” in a desk drawer in the Oval Office – photos with brief biographies and personality sketches of leading al-Qaeda figures, whose faces could be satisfyingly crossed out when killed or captured. He clearly adored it when he got to dress up, whether in a flight suit landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier in May 2003, or in front of hoo-aahing crowds of soldiers wearing a specially tailored military-style jacket with “George W. Bush, Commander In Chief” hand-stitched across the heart. As earlier in life, he was supported (Karl Rove), enabled (Condoleezza Rice), cosseted (various officials), and so became “the decider,” a willing figurehead (as he had been, for instance, when he was an “owner” of the Texas Rangers), manipulated by his co-president Dick Cheney. In these surroundings, he was able to take war play to an imperial level. In the end, however, this act of his life, too, could lead nowhere but to failure.

As it happened, reality possessed its own set of shock-and-awe weaponry. Above all, reality was unimpressed with history’s self-proclaimed “actors,” working so hard on the global stage to create their own reality. When it came to who really owned what, it turned out that reality owned the works and that possession was indeed nine-tenths of one law that even George Bush’s handlers and his fervent neocon followers couldn’t suspend.

Exit Stage Right

The results were sadly predictable. The bubble world of George W. Bush was bound to be burst. Based on fantasies, false promises, lies, and bait-and-switch tactics, it was destined for foreclosure. At home and abroad, after all, it had been created using the equivalent of subprime mortgages, and the result, unsurprisingly, was a dismally subprime administration.

Now, of course, the bill collector is at the door and the property – the USA – is worth a good deal less than on Nov. 4, 2000. George W. Bush is a discredited president; his job approval ratings could hardly be lower; his bubble world gone bust.

Nonetheless, let’s remember one other theme of his previous life. Whatever his failures, Bush always walked away from disastrous dealings enriched, while others were left holding the bag. Don’t imagine for a second that the equivalent isn’t about to repeat itself. He will leave a country functionally under the gun of foreclosure, a world far more aflame and dangerous than the one he faced on entering the Oval Office. But he won’t suffer.

He will have his new house in Dallas (not to speak of the “ranch” in Crawford) and his more than $200 million presidential “library” and “freedom institute” at Southern Methodist University; and then there’s always that 20 percent of America – they know who they are – who think his presidency was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Believe me, 20 percent of America is more than enough to pony up spectacular sums, once Bush takes to the talk circuit. As the president himself put it enthusiastically,”‘I’ll give some speeches, just to replenish the ol’ coffers.’ With assets that have been estimated as high as nearly $21 million, Mr. Bush added, ‘I don’t know what my dad gets – it’s more than 50-75′ thousand dollars a speech, and ‘Clinton’s making a lot of money.’”

This is how a legacy-student-turned-president fails upward. Every disaster leaves him better off.

The same can’t be said for the country or the world, saddled with his “legacy.”

Still, his administration has been foreclosed. Perhaps there’s ignominy in that. Now, the rest of us need to get out the brooms and start sweeping the stables.

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With Bush on way out, Guantanamo quieting down

Monday, November 3rd, 2008

By David McFadden |

Camp Justice, erected six months ago for the first U.S. war-crimes trials in a half-century, already feels like a ghost town.

A hundred canvas tents pitched on a weed-choked airfield to house an army of lawyers and journalists stand mostly empty, even as air conditioning blasts through them to keep iguanas and large rodents at bay.

Only three reporters showed up this week for the trial of Osama bin Laden’s alleged communications specialist, in contrast to the dozens at earlier hearings.

With the clock running out on the Bush administration, so too is it ticking for America’s six-year attempt to try what it called “the worst of the worst” for crimes of war.

“It is getting quiet here,” lamented Kiplin Rall, a Jamaican managing a small convenience store in a rusting hangar at Camp Justice.

Barack Obama and John McCain have both pledged, if elected, to close the offshore prison at Guantanamo Bay. Amnesty International Secretary-General Irene Khan urged whoever wins to make good on that promise in his first 100 days in office.

The current trial, which charges Ali Hamza al-Bahlul with being bin Laden’s media specialist, is only the second held since then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld outlined the initial rules in March 2002.

Only one more is scheduled before Bush’s term ends on Jan. 20: a relatively minor case that charges an Afghan with wounding two U.S. soldiers and their interpreter when he was 16 or 17 in 2002. A judge threw out his confession this week because it was obtained through torture.

In all, 255 men are being held at Guantanamo, the great majority without charges. Army Col. Lawrence Morris, Guantanamo’s chief prosecutor, said two dozen cases are at various stages, with another dozen or so moving toward charges.

But Morris’ predecessor, retired Air Force Col. Morris Davis, said those cases will likely never be brought forward as war-crimes trials, known as military commissions, at Guantanamo Bay. He said trials could conceivably be held elsewhere, but the system would need to be fundamentally changed for that to happen.

“Whoever wins next week should ask the Bush administration to suspend the military commissions since the winner inherits all the mess that piles up from now until Inauguration Day,” said Davis, who quit last year complaining of political interference.

The Pentagon declined to comment on the future of the trials. A spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, instead referred to a statement he made last summer, when he said the United States is trying to decrease Guantanamo’s prison population and doesn’t want to be the world’s jailer.

The heyday for journalists seems to be history. Only months ago, the military periodically flew dozens of print reporters, TV crews, pool photographers and sketch artists to Guantanamo Bay from Andrews Air Force Base near Washington.

Once they landed in the arid heat, they were met by soldiers who shepherded them in buses and a boat across the bay to a press room to watch court proceedings on a big-screen TV. Military public affairs officers stood by to answer questions.

At night, the journalists were ferried back across the bay to their Combined Bachelor Quarters, where they shared drinks and conversation before bed.

These days, the military press liaisons outnumber the journalists. Only reporters from AP, Reuters and the Miami Herald were present for this week’s trial.

The reporters don’t stay across the bay during the hearings anymore. Now, they sleep in tents erected on a cracked, abandoned airstrip near the two courthouses. Camp Justice has roughly 100 tents, each with six beds.

Overhead, turkey vultures soar on thermal updrafts, as if waiting for the whole affair to roll over, legs up.

This article appeared on page A - 2 of the San Francisco Chronicle

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Policing “target communities”

Monday, November 3rd, 2008

By Paul Donovan | The decision of the Court of Appeal that the state can place people under control orders (house arrest) without ever telling them what they are accused of has huge implications for civil rights.

A control order works by tagging the individual around the ankle and restricting him or her to a house or flat for a set number of hours each day. When the individual leaves the premises, they have a set area in which they are able to move. The individual has to ring the tagging company a number of times each day from a dedicated phone and may also be required to report to a police station.

The case of Ceri Bullivant underlines the dangers. A Muslim from Essex, Bullivant was put on trial before last Christmas for breaking the terms of a control order. His solicitor, Gareth Peirce, argued successfully for his acquittal and says he was cleared after it emerged that the basis for the control order was a tip-off from “a friend of Ceri’s mother who, after drinking heavily, had phoned Scotland Yard, which failed to ever contact the caller to ask for further information”.

The way in which anti-terror laws can be used for purposes other that those for which they were purportedly enacted are becoming legend. For instance, anti-terror powers were deployed against pensioner Walter Wolfgang for his protest at the 2005 Labour Party conference. He was forcibly ejected from the conference centre after observing that Jack Straw was talking “nonsense”. The ensuing publicity helped Wolfgang to get elected to Labour’s National Executive Committee.

Others to have fallen foul of the contentious legislation include arms protesters arrested outside London’s ExCeL exhibition centre. Most recently, it was used as the reason for freezing of the funds of Icelandic banks as they collapsed into bankruptcy.

All this is aside of the 1,343 times that 46 councils have used anti-terror laws under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act for offences such as rogue trading, benefit fraud and anti-social behaviour.

To find the root of this diminution of human rights, it is necessary to go back to the Birmingham pub bombings of 1974. The biggest mass murder in British history at the time claimed 21 lives and led to the passing into law of the first Prevention of Terrorism Act. Then Home Secretary Roy Jenkins introduced the PTA on November 25 1974 declaring that “the powers… are draconian. In combination, they are unprecedented in peacetime.” The Bill bringing in seven-day pre-charge detention passed in record time, clearing both Houses of Parliament by November 29.

The PTA was rewritten in 1976, 1984 and again in 1989. However, it continued to be used as emergency “temporary” powers that had to be renewed each year.

The first person arrested under the Act was Paul Hill, who was one of the innocent men subsequently convicted of the Guildford pub bombings. He served 15 years in prison before being freed by the Court of Appeal. A succession of miscarriages of justice followed over the next two decades, with the whole Irish Roman Catholic community becoming regarded as generally suspect.

It is mistake to think that the PTA was brought in solely to combat Irish terrorism. The real agenda has been the gradual erosion of human rights in the name of security. This could be clearly seen at the start of the new millennium when the Government brought forward the Terrorism Act 2000 – at a time of peace in Northern Ireland and before the events of September 11.

The Terrorism Act doubled the period of time allowed for pre-charge detention from seven days to 14. It also broadened out the definition of terrorism beyond Irish groups. Terrorism was also to include “the threat” of “serious damage to property” in ways “designed to influence government” for a “political cause” anywhere in the world. Notably, there was no pretence of the legislation being temporary and so in need of renewal each year.

The next step was the British Government’s response to the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11. This included the reintroduction of internment with the Anti-Terror Crime and Security Act. This allowed for foreign nationals who cannot be deported or removed for fear of torture abroad to be detained indefinitely without trial on the basis of secret intelligence that neither they nor their lawyers could view.

After September 11, 12 men were taken almost immediately into custody in Belmarsh prison. They were then detained for three years until the House of Lords ruling the ATCSA unlawful under the Human Rights Act.

This led to the next Prevention of Terrorism Act in March 2005 which introduced the concept of control orders. Those who had been held in Belmarsh were put under control orders. They still were not told of what they were accused.

Bruce Kent, who has visited several men put under control orders since 2005, describes the system as “callously cruel”. The veteran peace campaigner recalls a man under the conditions of his control order in north London not being allowed to visit Finsbury Park, which was 100 yards away from where he was living. However, he was permitted to go Clissold Park, which was three quarters of a mile away.

Says Kent: “At the same time, in the two hours that he was allowed out at lunchtime, he had to report to a police station in the opposite direction,”

He describes another case in which “a man under a control order was checking into the police station every day as required. On one occasion, he was just grabbed by the police and sent to Long Lartin prison.”

In other cases, suspects were allowed to go to the mosque, but parts of the bus route they wanted to take were ruled outside the area of movement. This meant it was impossible to get there in time for prayers.

At the time that control orders were first imposed, there was also an attempt under the PTA 2005 to increase the pre-charge detention period from 14 days to 90. However, in one of those rare victories for civil liberties, this was rejected in favour of 28 days. This still constituted a doubling of the previous limit and a quadrupling of Roy Jenkins’ previous “draconian” measure.

More recently, Gordon Brown Government’s attempted to demonstrate its anti-terror credentials with an introducing 42 days’ detention with charge. This was overwhelmingly defeated in the House of Lords, but it is unlikely that the House of Commons will let the issue lie indefinitely.

Bruce Kent’s view is: “The problem is that, with control orders, we have had indefinite detention for years. There is a tendency among some campaigners to focus on headline-grabbing issues like 42-day pre-charge detention, while ignoring the iniquity of control orders. It’s a bit like ignoring the elephant in the room.”

The project that began back in November 1974 has come a long way and it is still a work in progress. First, it was the Irish who were the suspect community; now it is the Muslims. In the future, it could be another group and ultimately anyone who dissents. As Gareth Peirce warns: “The continuing experiment is dangerous and insidious in more than one way. It has become very clear that, when one challenge is overcome, the goalposts are moved and a new system comes in.”

The Court of Appeal’s recent decision to uphold the right to impose control orders without the subject knowing what they are charged with is another dangerous step.

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Judge orders White House to produce wiretap memos

Monday, November 3rd, 2008

By JOAN LOWY |

A judge has ordered the Justice Department to produce White House memos that provide the legal basis for the Bush administration’s post-Sept. 11 warrantless wiretapping program.

U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy Jr. signed an order Friday requiring the department to produce the memos by the White House legal counsel’s office by Nov. 17. He said he will review the memos in private to determine if any information can be released publicly without violating attorney-client privilege or jeopardizing national security.

Kennedy issued his order in response to lawsuits by civil liberties groups in 2005 after news reports disclosed the wiretapping.

The department had argued that the memos were protected attorney-client communications and contain classified information.

But Kennedy said that the attorney-client argument was “too vague” and that he would have to look at the documents himself to determine if that argument is valid and also to see if there is information that can be released without endangering national security.

Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said Saturday the department is reviewing the opinion and will “respond appropriately in court.”

Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush authorized the National Security Agency to spy on calls between people in the U.S. and suspected terrorists abroad without obtaining court warrants. The administration said it needed to act more quickly than the court could and that the president had inherent authority under the Constitution to order warrantless domestic spying.

After the program was challenged in court, Bush last year put it under the supervision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, established in 1978 after the domestic spying scandals of the 1970s.

“We think just as a common sense matter the legal theories for the president’s wiretap programs cannot be classified and should be available to the public,” said Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, one of the groups seeking the memos.

“It’s an important decision because up to this point the judge has relied on the government’s assertion that it has done everything properly under the law and that it has disclosed everything it needs to disclose,” Rotenberg said Saturday.

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US Above The Law

Monday, November 3rd, 2008

FFF | President Bush has been making a big hullabaloo over the fact that the Iraqi regime has not signed on to an agreement that would authorize U.S. forces to remain in Iraq after December 31. Bush says that if an agreement is not signed between him and the Iraqi government, he will cease military operations in Iraq, keeping his military forces inside U.S. bases within Iraq. Bush says that “the law” and “Iraqi sovereignty” would require him to do this, even though he has yet to clarify how “the law” and “Iraqi sovereignty” permit him to keep any forces in Iraq, whether inside U.S. bases or not, if there is no agreement signed extending Bush’s occupation of the country.

In any event, apparently “the law” and the concept of “sovereignty” don’t apply to Syria and Pakistan. Those are two independent countries that Bush’s military forces have recently attacked, killing scores of Pakistanis and Syrians.

Bush says that “the law of self-defense” authorizes his military attacks against these two sovereign and independent countries. He says that people who are trying to evict Bush’s forces from Iraq are using these two countries as bases of operations.

There is at least one big problem, however, with Bush’s interpretation of “the law”: In Iraq Bush is the aggressor — the attacker — not the defender. Iraq is the defender. Therefore, as the attacker Bush is precluded from claiming self-defense when the defender attempts to defend itself.

Assume that an armed robber shoots at you. You have the right of self-defense. You have the right to fire back at the robber. When you fire back, the law does not entitle the robber to claim “self-defense” when he fires at you again. Since he was the one who initiated the attack, only his victim has the right of self-defense.

The principle is no different with respect to nations. Neither the Iraqi government nor the Iraqi people ever attacked the United States. Instead, Bush and his army attacked Iraq. That makes the U.S. the attacker, the aggressor. Iraq is the defender.

Was Bush’s attack legal? Of course not. For one thing, wars of aggression were punished as war crimes at Nuremberg. Second, Bush never secured a congressional declaration of war, which the U.S. Constitution requires. That makes Bush’s war on Iraq illegal under our form of government. Third, the UN Charter, to which the U.S. is a signatory, makes attacks on other countries illegal.

Thus, since Bush attacked Iraq, only Iraq can claim self-defense, not Bush. Moreover, the principle is the same with respect to Bush’s recent attacks on Syria and Pakistan. Not only is Bush’s violation of the sovereignty of those nations as illegal as when he violated Iraqi sovereignty with his initial invasion, Bush’s self-defense justification is as faulty and fallacious as an armed robber’s claim that he was defending himself from his victim’s attempt to defend himself.

The fact is that the Bush regime is going to do whatever it wants to do. In Bush’s mind, whatever he does is legal and moral because it’s all for “freedom” or in accordance with some plan of God. Thus, all the hullabaloo about the necessity for the Iraqis to sign an agreement extending Bush’s occupation of the country is just smokescreen. Bush obviously wants a cover for his continued occupation of the country. But if the Iraqi regime fails to sign an agreement by the December 31 deadline, that’s not going to stop Bush from employing his army any way he wants. That’s what he’s doing with Syria and Pakistan, and that’s what he will continue doing with Iraq. And it will all be legal, agreement or no agreement, because in Bush’s mind whatever the U.S. government does is automatically legal.

Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. Send him email jhornberger@fff.org

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